Friday, August 27, 2010

Color

This post is all about COLOR!

Summer is the perfect time to eat colorful foods. My new favorite thing: Stove top oatmeal with bananas, peanut butter, and blueberries
 


Another easy way to get in a lot of colorful veggies is to make a stir fry. Almost any vegetable tastes good in a stir fry so the sky is the limit.


Making this stir fry was also a good excuse to experiment using my new food scale!

Call me a loser, but I love this scale!




Benefits of using a food scale include:

  • Portion control
  • More accurate baking
  • Track nutritional data
  • Convert amounts from metric to standard or vice versa depending on what recipe you're using. 
  • Determine a more accurate portion size as some packaged foods are inaccurate (or so some say on the interweb)
It was hard getting a good picture of the side panel of this scale because the surface is so reflective, but you get the idea. It's basically a nutrition label off of any food packaging, but changes depending on what food code you enter.


I'll list the nutritional info of the stir fry in a bit - and if you're like me, you will be surprised at the data! First, I must share one of the stars of this stir fry. How gorgeous are these carrots?! These are organic, which may add to their vibrant color. I try to buy my carrots organic if I can because they are on the Dirty Dozen list.








Here are the list of ingredients and the weights and calorie count of each item that I added:

  • Potato: 151 grams, 106 calories (one TINY potato! Can you imagine the calories in those ginormous baked potatoes you can get in restaurants?)
  • Red pepper: 81 grams (about half), 25 calories
  • Celery: 86 g (2 stalks), 14 calories
  • Carrots: 174 g (3 carrots without greens), 71 cal
  • Green onion: 67 g, 21 cal
  • Green beans: 115 g, 36 cal
  • Broccoli: 161 g, 55 cal
  • Mushrooms: 134 g (about 6 brown button mushrooms), 36 cal
  • Cabbage: 214 g, 66 cal
  • Canola oil: 32 g (about 2 tbsp), 283 cal!!! (Good lord.)
  • Chowmein noodles to sprinkle on top: 13g, 69 cal
  • Soy sauce: About 30 cal
  • Sweet and Sour Sauce: About 90 cal
  • TOTAL calorie count: 902 calories!! 
Would you EVER guess that a vegetarian stir fry would have so many calories? The food scale definitely put things into perspective for me. I am doing Weight Watchers, which allows approximately 1 cup of most vegetables for 0 points. I would have thought I was eating a very low number of calories if I was going off of Weight Watchers points values. NOT SO. I split this into two meals, which made it better, but still! While vegetables have a TON of nutrients and vitamins, they are not calorie free. This is one way the food scale helped me with portion awareness.

So pretty. And tasty.



So happy it's the weekend!

2 comments:

  1. Shannon have you ever tried steel cut oats? Wonderful! They are nutty and have a great texture. I've made them in the crock pot but prefer them on the stove. Add in some dried blueberries, vanilla and dates and you don't need any extra sweetener!

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  2. I'll be trying those next! I don't add any sugar to my stove top oatmeal, I agree that the fruit adds enough sweetness by itself :)

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